Grindhouse streaming

I listen to a lot of podcasts where they tell us in advance the movie they're going to talk about in the coming weeks so you can watch it to get more out of the discussion. ("A lot" might be a stretch. I have two main movie podcasts and then others that sometimes involve movies.) 

With new releases, you might be seeing those movies anyway, especially if you like to keep up on what's current. But you likely were not planning to watch the old movie they're planning to talk about, unless they prompt you to do it.

I don't usually, but on Friday, as I was about to listen to a podcast that discussed Robert Rodriguez' From Dusk Till Dawn, I decided it had been a long time since my last viewing, and why not watch it tonight?

Actually it took a long time for my first viewing of From Dusk Till Dawn, so long that when I finally saw it at the start of 2013, it prompted me to write only my second in my nascent "I finally saw" series, which gets periodic entries and has had another 18 in the dozen years since then. Rewatching movies you didn't see until 17 years after they came out means that those movies have entered into your group of personal favorites, though I suppose it takes the second viewing to confirm that.

My second viewing was about as positive as my first, though it might not have been if I'd listened to the podcast first. On The Next Picture Show, where the four hosts are generally inclined toward politeness, they each came in with a different variation on how it didn't hold up very well. So I guess I'm glad that wasn't in my head as I watched it.

Yes there are some icky things in there. For example, it's quite a choice to have one of the two main characters you're following -- played by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote the script -- rape and kill the woman they've taken as hostage, in such a grisly fashion that you only see flashes of it. Though the film steers this clear of being completely lurid and prurient, in the following sense: This hostage is not some beautiful young girl, but a middle-aged woman, indicating perhaps that Richie Gecko has more screws loose than to just be written off as a deviant psychopath who craves young flesh. (Which he also does with the Juliette Lewis character, though fortunately, that has no similar outcome.) The movie is not tawdry with its choice of victim, and what it confronts us with is in that way more complicated. 

Anyway, I'm here today not to give the movie a full analysis, since I likely talked about what makes the movie a ton of fun (a lot of things) and what gives me pause (a few, one of which I've already touched on) in this post when I first wrote about it. I'm here for two observations and they are both variations on the title of this post.

So one use of the term "Grindhouse" is an intentional callback to the "film" -- actually separated out into two films when subsequently available -- that Rodriguez and Tarantino made in 2007. Rodriguez' Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof were originally mashed together as a single film called Grindhouse, which is still how I have this listed in my movie lists, though they are two different stories with two different casts, divided from one another by fake trailers -- most of which have also resulted in their own movies.

In the same way that Grindhouse was divided between Tarantino and Rodriguez, so is From Dusk Till Dawn, though I don't remember really considering that until this viewing (and until they made reference to it on the podcast). Although the two halves of FDTD are not of equal length, it does take a suspiciously long amount of time to get to the Titty Twister in Mexico, a lot longer than you would expect given that this is going to be main thrust of the film, ostensibly. The Tarantino portion, the dialogue-heavy first half that features more traditionally Tarantino content about violent men on the run, gets about the first 40 minutes, while the Rodriguez' portion, where we start getting exploding vampires and other practical effects, run for more or less the last hour.

On the podcast they debated which half they actually preferred, and I don't know that I myself have an answer to that because I like the whole thing. But it did make me realize that this was essentially a dry run at a jointly divided project that would have a more intentional incarnation in Grindhouse. (Where, for the record, I do like the Rodriguez half better. I've only seen each that one time, which means I haven't ever given Death Proof a second chance, but I vibed better with Planet Terror back then and I suspect I still would -- even though obviously Tarantino's is the career I vastly prefer.)

The second use of the term "Grindhouse" indicates more the style of B movie and its projection, not the movie Grindhouse.

You may recall that the film itself is meant to look really shitty in that movie, full of cigarettes burns (the type that used to mark the changing of reels) and other attempts to make the physical film look like it's been damaged and gone through the ringer. Like it was sitting around in some dusty theater where people might have stepped on it, torn it, or poured coffee on it. Or more likely, beer.

Well, I got a little of that effect watching From Dusk Till Dawn, through no fault of the film itself.

I have an occasional problem with streaming on Stan, and I thought it was something that had been fixed when I went through all that testing and contacting of customer support earlier this year, trying to diagnose and resolve an issue with the image quality. (It turns out it was something having to do with the HDMI port I was using on our TV, though I still haven't figured out why that should have been the case.) The problem I thought was resolved at that time was the tendency of the stream to double back one second, then skip forward a second, bringing the dialogue momentarily out of sync, and creating an overall irritating viewing experience. This partially derailed my most recent viewing of The Crow, timed to the release of the Crow remake last year.

This phenomenon was back with FDTD. I don't know why. The HDMI port should not have anything to do with this, as it would seem to be an internet speed issue of some sort, though I wasn't willing to rule out Stan just being an inferior product. 

But this time it did not bother me, because I made it part of the experience. It was like I was watching the same sort of compromised celluloid that they showed in the grindhouse theaters, suited to the outrageous subject matter of this movie.

That aesthetic used by Rodriguez and Tarantino in 2007 was designed to throw us back to an era that was well and truly gone. But that was even before streaming and before shooting on actual celluloid became a thing of the past. Eighteen years later, when everything is digitally projected and most of us no longer have a problem with buffering, it was fun, for a moment, to be reminded of a time when everything was still a bit rough around the edges, kind of like From Dusk Till Dawn itself.

I finally saw: From Dusk Till Dawn

Who knows why it took me 17 years to finally see From Dusk Till Dawn.

Actually, I do. It came out during that phase when I looked down my nose at Quentin Tarantino for really wanting to be an actor. "Yeah, I'm a director, but what I really want to do is act." It could have been the derailment of his career, if he'd let it. I assumed that FDTD was some massive ego stroke on his part, and that the self-deception would permeate the project.

Nope.

In fact, Tarantino is pretty darn good at playing a demented psycho. The surprising part is that he actually underplays being a demented psycho. I figured he'd at least chew the scenery, but he doesn't even do that. There's nothing he does that's at the same ill-advised intensity level of the "dead ni**er storage" scene in Pulp Fiction.

Tarantino's work was just one of many pleasant surprises in this movie.

For example, how good is that first half? How nice is it to see George Clooney (who was not yet GEORGE CLOONEY) playing "a bastard, but not a fucking bastard"? (Great line -- actually, his last of the movie.) He really commits to being a bad person, but he's also not chewing scenery -- in fact, what I really admired about his work was the couple throwaway facial tics he employs to subtly underscore the significance of certain moments. He delivers the best of Tarantino's sharp dialogue, but Tarantino also saves plenty of that for the opening conversation between a Texas cop (Michael Parks, so great years later in Red State) and a liquor store cashier (John Hawkes, so great years later in ... everything), the main thrust of which is whether mentally challenged people should be allowed to work in food preparation. The scene walks that Tarantino fine line of poor taste and walks it well. I love the way the scene devolves, and how Hawkes' character really was trying to do the bidding of Seth and Richie Gecko when they gave him specific instructions on how to behave with the cop -- specific instructions that he followed to the letter, to no avail as far as psycho Richie was concerned.

And how good are Harvey Keitel and the members of his family, not only the professional actor (Juliette Lewis), but the novice (Ernest Liu)? Okay, Liu isn't great, but he holds his own. And I'd never seen Keitel in a role like this before: bearded, subdued, that familiar trope of the pastor who's lost his faith in God, but seeming new-ish here. Lewis also goes way under-the-top, something she's been accused of very few times in her career. In fact, she's got some priceless, low-key facial reactions, like when she's trying to figure out what the hell Tarantino's talking about when he tries a clumsy innuendo, referencing a moment in which he imagined her asking him to give her cunnilingus.

And how good is that second half? Maybe not as good as the first half, but totally different, and to some people, probably better than the first half. Like, maybe to Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi. That's some straight-up Raimi-Jackson monster stuff in the second half, and some incredibly imaginative weapons with which to kill them. Few settings encapsulate that wild west spirit we believe exists in "lawless" Mexico than the Titty Twister -- even before you know it's a vampire hive. And as good as all that vampire-killin' is, the movie's most enduring moment for me may be Salma Hayek's exotic dance with a large yellow snake. I don't usually like to speak too much about my male heterosexual desires on this blog, but -- hubba hubba.

So yeah, I liked From Dusk Till Dawn. I liked it a heckuva lot.

When I wrote my first in this "series" called I Finally Saw last October (A Nightmare on Elm Street), I set out to determine if the film still holds up -- though "holds up" is a phrase you usually use about films you've already seen, but not in many years. So I'm really trying to figure out if I could still see the movie through the eyes of the people who saw it (and loved it) when it was brand new.

I didn't think it was possible to return to that mid-1990s moment when ultra-violence seemed fresh and new, and "Tarantino-esque" was only starting to become a made-up word.

But there I was, watching this movie, feeling like a giddy 23-year-old again.